Responsive reading / Edward Hirsch.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hirsch, Edward.

Series:

Poets on poetry

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Poetry--History and criticism.

Poetry.

Physical Description:

vii, 181 pages ; 21 cm.

Place of Publication:

Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, [1999]

Summary:

Responsive Reading brims with wide-ranging encounters and explorations, fundamental discoveries and reconsiderations. It is a collection of deep, attentive, and appreciative essays. In the book, reading itself is treated as a creative act, an intimate, triggering, and momentous activity.

The collection begins with an essay on the Hebrew Bible and concludes with a memoir of the author's grandfather, whose lost poems the author has tried to envision. Other essays consider a wide range of writers, including Dante, Emerson, Derek Walcott, Larkin, and Lorca; the Polish poets Zbigniew Herbert, Aleksander Wat, and Wislawa Szymborska; and the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai. An award-winning essay, "The Imaginary Irish Peasant," tracks a company of Irish writers to the Irish countryside, which is both a real and an imagined place, a symbol-laden territory. Indeed, all these pieces testify to a poet's sublime experience of reading.

Contents:

The female Yahwist

A fresh hell

Emerson

The imaginary Irish peasant

Federico García Lorca

Joseph Cornell

Zbigniew Herbert

Aleksander Wat

Wislawa Szymborska

Philip Larkin

Derek Walcott

Yehuda Amichai

Donald Barthelme

To wrestle an angel

My grandfather's poems.

Notes:

Collection of previously published essays.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN:

0472096923

0472066927

OCLC:

40901182